Saturday, October 6, 2007

Lordy, did this movie suck. It was allegedly made in 1979, but watching it you’d never know it didn’t come out sometime in the mid-50s. It’s a movie where a big monster eats teens at night after one or two stray from the pack, and connects it with an environmentalist message about the evils of pollution, much like all the big monsters from back in the day were.The overall film quality doesn’t help matters either. It’s extremely fuzzy, and the colors bleed into each other quite a bit, making it look like a third or fourth generation copy of an old, worn-out VHS. Despite having a full DVD all to itself, it has a similar level of quality as one of those movies you’ll get on a big budget pack, with four movies crammed onto one disc. It is a bit understandable in this case, however. When your monster looks like a rubber plesiosaur with a Fu Manchu ‘stache, I can understand the desire to keep the picture quality down low enough that it’s hard to make out what’s going on.

It’s hard to say who this was supposed to appeal to. It’s obviously meant to be a throwback to the old 50s style sci fi horrors, but those old ones had a cheesy charm to them that’s thoroughly nonexistent here. Even drivel like, say, The Giant Gila Monster, which featured an iguana tearing apart tiny models of buildings, was more entertaining (and, I might add, had better picture quality too, despite shring DVD space with three other films). There’s really only one effective moment in the entire film, and it comes right at the end. After the evil monster is dead, and everyone feels safe, we see a giant egg by the lake starting to hatch. A possible sequel to this film? Now that’s scary.